Worcester Bug Hunt – part 18
by taxi - October 31, 2008 12:10pm
I stumbled upon this article in the Nashua Telegraph this morning and did a double take on this: “The beetle is well-established in Canada, where it has destroyed millions of trees.”
After a little searching, I found this article from last week out of the Toronto area, which included this complaint, “…the U.S. government has spent $168 million to combat the Asian long-horned beetle while Canadian spending is shrouded in secrecy and minimization of funding.”
Apparently, a quarantine zone was established in the Toronto – Vaughan area in 2004, according to this article from 2005 on the Canadian Nursery Landscape Association’s webpage. But I haven’t found anything about any other infestations in Canada yet… at least for the ALB. The Emerald Ash Borer is another story, altogether. According to Wikipedia, “It has killed at least 25 million ash trees so far and threatens to decimate the ash trees throughout North America.”
So, maybe it’s mostly the Emerald Ash Borer that has prompted the USDA to suddenly issue an order a couple of days ago, requiring heat treatment of all wood from Canada coming into the US. The news of this announcement, reported out of northern Maine, however, includes mention of the Asian Longhorned Beetle, too.
After all of that, the “shrouded in secrecy” claim in the first article I mentioned above certainly does seem ominous, doesn’t it? All that hardwood forest north of the border, all those millions of square miles without a soul. Is it already infested?
Yesterday’s article in the T&G mentions some numbers involved with Worcester’s infestation that everyone should ponder. There are 635,000 trees within the Worcester quarantine zone, but less than 2% of them have been surveyed so far. Of the 9,260 trees surveyed, 28% have been found to be infested. Comparing the 635,000 trees in Worcester to previous US infestations, New Jersey had 112,000 potential host trees to survey and New York had 350,000.
The Worcester Bug Hunt has only just begun.